What if? (Fiction by Edward Johnson, provided to Nathan Barton for The Price of Liberty!)

Warning: not our usual fare!

Mama’s Note: We could get very lost in such speculation. While I appreciate Edward’s story, I would rather have The Price of Liberty continue to concentrate on things that may help individuals realize their own sovereign authority, and why non-voluntary government is always and everywhere the problem, not a solution.

Dateline: 20 January 2018

In the 2016 election, the GOP candidate received a 52% majority and 375 of 535 electoral votes (LP candidate Johnson getting 10, and Hillary Clinton getting 150), securing the White House, but the US Senate is taken over by the Democratic Party with 62 seats, and the US House of Representatives has 220 GOP, 213 Democratic and 2 Independent members. Widespread voter fraud is alleged.

Following the seating of the new Congress on 4 January, Ruth Bader Ginsberg announces her immediate retirement, and the current occupant of the White House nominates Stacy Yandel of Illinois and Diane Humatewa of Arizona to the Supreme Court, and in an early-morning vote, the Senate votes 62 to 38 to confirm the first lesbian black and first native American female on the SCOTUS. Democrats and liberals stage torchlight parades to celebrate, and after six parade marchers are shot, with three killed (two black and one hispanic), supposedly by cops, the celebration is followed by three nights of rioting and looting in sixty-five cities nationwide, resulting in the deaths of 43 police, 54 firefighters, 75 protesters, and at least 165 bystanders, as two hundred and sixty-two blocks in the various cities are torched.

The White House refuses to authorize any federal agency to respond or assist, and activates every National Guard unit called out by the twenty-three governors, federalizing them to prevent their states from using them to restore order in the burning cities. (Some units deploy anyway: some units are paralyzed and even begin fighting internally.) Only in DC are federal and “National Guard” (DC has a “National Guard”) allowed to put down the protests and riots, but only under the direct orders of a “reconciliation council.” It would later be learned that more than 1,000 rioters were killed and at least 4,500 wounded, together with 110 dead police and soldiers, and more than 500 wounded, in suppressing the “insurrectionists” over a period of more than a week, in DC. Casualties in other cities are similar but lower.

In DC, this violence led to the evacuation of approximately 200 members of the House of Representatives and a total of 13 Senators, “for their immediate safety,” This in turn led to the so-called Rump Congress, and its later actions. The conditions in DC also forced the White House to relocate, at first to Mt. Weather and then to Fort Belvoir, across the Potomac from DC and not far from Mt. Vernon.

It was also this violence which caused POTUS-elect Trump and VPOTUS-elect Pence to move their inauguration ceremony to Denver, where on the 20th of January, with less than half of Congress, just three members of SCOTUS, and neither of the “outgoing” POTUS/VPOTUS present. The inauguration is held on the Civic Center in Denver, cleaned of a fresh snow and the dozen or so bodies of protesters from recent riots, and protected by two brigades of the 4th Infantry Division from nearby Fort Carson, together with various ad-hoc units of the US Air Force Academy, Space Command, and National Guard units from a dozen states.

Of course, this did not go well in DC, and following an emergency ruling by the Supreme Court (now temporarily meeting at Joint Base Andrews with three of its members “sick” and “hospitalized” (according to DC announcements, although they looked healthy enough at the inauguration ceremony in Denver several days earlier)) declaring that the GOP pair were acting illegally, the supposedly ex-POTUS asked Congress to elect a new president, “as authorized by the Constitiution.”

The Rump Congress was more than willing to do so, and moved swiftly to appoint “acting Congressmen” for certain states whose Representatives were absent, and then voting 27 to 23 to elect Hillary Clinton as POTUS and, in a surprise move, Barack Obama as VPOTUS.

Was anyone really surprised when just two weeks later, the Rump Congress’ Representatives passed a bill of impeachment charging Clinton with sixty-two counts of “high crimes and misdemeanors” going all the way back to ordering the vandalizing of computers and stealing of silverware from the White House in 2000? Or that five days later, the Senate convicted her of forty-three charges and Secret Service agents arrested her (and her husband) to transport them to Guantanamo, at last emptied of its foreign detainees?

Thus began the fratricidal conflict called the Second American Civil War.

Nathan’s note: I am told by Mr. Johnson that he has more in this “future history” if readers are interested. I am, but let me know. This isn’t the usual fare of The Price of Liberty!